Vernon Barnes

Of course this new version of Waves Central, after deciding I needed to download the sample content again when the collection was update from version 10 to 11 also decided it needed to go on the C drive and not the sample drive where the previous data resided. I am now in the process of moving it across before changing the sample paths on all the instruments. I will check the settings in Waves Central to see if sample location can be specified. I will report back....

I thought that is what is happening, its taking ages.

Well you guys were certainly not wrong about the savings using EveryPlugin . I was expecting a few dollars but the upgrades I wanted came down fro $88 to $60! The process of getting the upgrade code from Waves and making the purchase through EP was very smooth. Incidentally, returning to the original issue I experienced the same issues on my android phone too!

I did not have this problem, but load times were quite slow until I did a batch re-save. I tend to do one as a matter of course these days as it generally reduces load times.

In fact that is what Waves is now suggesting I do as they cannot replicate the issue they say go through a dealer. I will try EveryPlugin tomorrow.

This nice. I would call it a set of presets rather than an "expansion" and I does not appear to add any further samples. Its a bunch of NKI files taking advantage of the existing features. They are very well done however and well worth the small download.

They don't want my money by the look of it. Trying to pay with Paypal results in a certificate error when Paypal tries to connect back to Waves. Slightly different error messages depending on the browser, but happens in The Edge, Firefox and Chrome. Trying to pay by credit card - I can enter the name on the card but the next field for the CIV number is there but wont accept any input. There is no field for credit card number. This happens in three browsers on three different computers, two Windows 10 and an old Vista desktop. I have tried clearing the cache as suggested by Waves support with no joy. Anyone here had a similar problem.

Looks like I can upgrade my individual instruments to to the Inspire bundle. This adds OVox and the vocoder for $58 and should renew the expired WUP on the other instruments. Question has anybody had issues with mixing version 10 and 11 plugins? The FAQ seems to indicate it won't be a problem but......

There is quite a bit more to it. I am on Composer Cloud so I did not have to consider the upgrade cost. Spaces II has become my goto convolution. If I dropped the subscription it's one thing I would buy straight away.

Mmmmm, I think I will give the demo a spin.

9 faders! Could be a positive for controlling Hammond emulations.

Over the holidays I was resisting GAS. I was really close to buying another Toontrack SDX. I decided to spend some time with the ones I already had and delve deeper into the features while I was going through a dry spell writing wise.. Previously I had simply routed the individual drums and mics to channels in the DAW. Now I started to route internally to busses, setup sends, play with the builtin effects and get creative with the bleeds etc. Then route the busses to individual channels in Cakewalk and save a number of track templates. in All quite satisfying and it showed me I have a lot more than I thought I had. Of course looking at the differences in mic setup in various SDXs does increase ones curiosity about some of the other packs. Oh well. Next I decided to look in detail at the big EastWest kits in composer cloud. The Spike Stent and Joe Ciccarelli libraries. I had only given them a casual glance before but they are really rather good. They appear to be designed to sound good "straight out of the box" with a large range of presets covering many styles. There are plenty of good MIDI grooves too. The mixer has in/out kick mics, top and bottom snare mics etc. there are room mics and bleeds so the whole thing is more versatile than I had first imagined. The mixer channels can of course be sent to separate channels in your DAW. All in all there are some very good options here for expanding the percussion pallet. Looking at the kits in other EW libraries like Ministry of Rock 2 or Fab Four it appears on certain kit pieces can be active in an instance at one time. You select these in the mixer tab. As a result several instances will need to loaded into Play to get a full kit. There are some useful sounds spread across various libraries once you realise the odd way things are setup. And finally, following the sad death of Neil Peart I went back and visited the older Sonic Reality library "Neil Peart Drums" for Kontakt (it used SR's Infinity Player as a licensing vehicle so Kontakt Player could be used.) Listening to some of the NP solos on Youtube that have been posted in the last couple of days I think SR had the tone of the drums, particularly the toms accurately done. Using Kontakt of course is a bit of a pain compared to dedicate drum samplers but the multis do a good job of routing in the Kontakt mixer so setting up individual outs is pretty easy. I enjoyed playing with this again and made a track template for future use. So the best deal may be something already sitting on your hard drive! P.S. I must give addictive Drums another try one day.

Black Grand is very good. There are no turkeys in this lot, I have them all. The Solina and Prophet are probably the weakest (in terms of features, not sound) but at these prices they worth grabbing.

Well, I had a short run through and I am not overly impressed by my first encounter. Some vowels and constants sound good but others less so. The phrases are OK and if they match what you are looking for they would be useful. Word builder at first glance is unconvincing, with practice one could tease more out of it but even the stock phrases are not that clear. To some extent one can get away with the vagueness on the choir libraries, like the bloke from 8Dio said "nobody understands what a choir is singing anyway" but here the weakness in word builder is more obvious. I am very happy to have this available on my composer cloud subscription and it will probably get some use but I am not sure i would have bought it. Realivox The Ladies is serious competition . There is no word builder, just stock articulations which can be chained and assigned to a keyswitch but this can be surprising versatile for la las and do wops and that sort of thing and it sounds a lot more realistic than the word builder phrases. There are also several different voices to choose from and stack if you so wish. (Needs the full version of Kontakt)

One possible use could be producing a guide vocal for a session singer. I have used Realivox The Ladies for this but the word builder could have potential.

I have not really played around with VOS, initial explorations did not grab me. I have had some success with Voices of the Opera and Voices of Empire. They are what they are, you probably don't want them too exposed in the mix but they stand up against other similar products.

Backup Singers is now available for download if you are on Composer Cloud, a 10GB download. I am downloading now but it will probably be tomorrow before I get chance to try it out.

The EW Installation Centre was updated yesterday a sign something is about to happen. Backing Singers is not showing up yet.

There seems to continuity between some tracks in as much as you would want to play the album in the right order.

Excellent band, Bent Knee!

I have SSD 4 and had hoped there would have been major improvements in the the interface so I installed the free version when it came out, but it did not make the step change needed for me to upgrade. I think SSD would get more use if the interface was better but I seldom fire it up. There are some nice kits in there but between Superior 3 and BFD3 I am pretty well covered.

Had got to be best album and song title of 2019. It's by A Formal Horse. The music is, like the title, wonderfully bonkers and unlike anything else I can think of. http://aformalhorse.com

I always use the downloader and I have not had installation issues. The main drawback of the downloader is you need twice the disc space on the target disc during the installation. The installation files can be deleted or moved after installation. If you download on another computer you can still use the downloader and copy the library folder across to you DAW.

No. but it needs the full version of Reaktor!

It was a simpler time when I was young. A great joy was getting hold of bangers (fireworks) and setting them off in cowpats.